I have a similar freezing problem as described by Arthur Skirvin, though my hardware configuration is different and freezing symptoms vary slightly. Hence my post here on meta. I do not frequently participate in the Super User community and wanted to determine how you handle duplicate issues that feature differing hardware.

While my symptoms are the same the cause could be wildly different-- so is an additional post warranted? Would such a post be closed as an exact duplicate? Is there even a "policy" or do you guys go more on what feels right.

Mostly I am just curios as to how the community works, but it would be helpful to have some guidance if I should be creating a new question. For now I've added a bounty to Arthur's question in the hopes that it will garnish additional answers which might fix my problem.

2 Answers
2

Cut-and-paste duplicate questions. These questions are the very
definition of exact duplicates; they are typically from users who
willfully take the very same question and post it again. Either
they’re not satisfied with the speed of answer, or they just don’t
know what they’re doing. We rely on Stack Overflow users to vote
down these “questions” and flag them for moderator attention. These
sorts of duplicates are typically deleted as soon as we see them, as
they’re borderline abuse of the system. They often don’t get
answers, so this is fairly easy to deal with. No grey area here.

Accidental duplicates. These questions aren’t copy and paste, but
they cover the exact same ground as an earlier Stack Overflow
question. The overlap is not ambiguous; the question uses the same
words and asks the same fundamental question, with no variation at
all. This is a failing on several levels; of the asker to do proper
diligence before asking, of our internal ask page title search, and
possibly of Google search as well. We rely on Stack Overflow users
to link these questions together by closing them as “exact
duplicate” and posting the URL (as a comment, or edit) to the
question this is a duplicate of. These sometimes have multiple good
answers attached to each question. We will use our new moderator
question merge function to merge them together without losing any
answers or comments.

Borderline duplicates. These questions are ambiguous; they’re in the
same ballpark as a previous question, but have subtle differences
that may make them legitimately standalone questions. These are
subject to interpretation. We rely on Stack Overflow users to tag
these questions appropriately so they naturally “group” with the
questions they’re related to. The more tags the questions have in
common, the more likely they are to show up together on the related
questions sidebar. You can also edit in links to the possibly
duplicated posts, if appropriate, but be sure to make the tags match
so the system can figure out the relationship without as much manual
effort. There’s often benefit to having multiple subtle variants of
a question around, as people tend to ask and search using completely
different words, and the better our coverage, the better odds our
fellow programmers can find the answer they’re looking for.

Help us build a great library of canonical answers. If you keep seeing the same form of questions, whether it’s mod_rewrite rules on Server Fault, freezing computers on Super User, or how to use regular expressions to parse HTML, write a great, canonical answer, once and for all. Make it community wiki so that as many other people as possible can make it great. Work really hard on writing something that is clear, concise, and understandable by as wide an audience as possible.